
Class 
Book 






THE 

PENTECOST OF 

CALAMITY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE 

PENTECOST OF 

CALAMITY 

By 

OWEN WISTER 

Author of " The Virginian," etc. 




Nebj garft 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1915 

All rights reserved 






OOPYBIOHT, 1915, 

By THE CUETIS PUBLISHING COMPANY. 



COPYEIGHT, 1915, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1915. 
Reprinted September, twice, October, twice, November, 
twice, 1915. 



Norruoorj tytesn 

J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



THE PENTECOST OF 
CALAMITY 

Ever the fiery Pentecost 

Girds with one flame the countless host. 

— Emerson. 



B 



Y various influences and agents 
the Past is summoned before 
us, more vivid than a dream. 
The process seems as magical as those 
whereof we read in fairy legends, where cir- 
cles are drawn, wands waved, mystic sylla- 
bles pronounced. Adjured by these rites, 
voices speak, or forms and faces shape 
themselves from nothing. So, through 
certain influences, not magical at all, 
our brains are made to flash with visions 
7 



8 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

of other days. Is there among us one 
to whom this experience is unknown? 
For whom no particular strain of music, 
or no special perfume, is linked with 
an inveterate association? Music and 
perfumes are among the most potent 
of these evocatory agents; but many 
more exist, such as words, sounds, hand- 
writing. Thus almost always, at the 
name of the town Cologne, the banks 
of the golden stream, the German 
Rhine, sweep into my sight as first I 
saw them long ago ; and from a steamer's 
deck I watch again, and again count, a 
train composed of twenty-one locomo- 
tives, moving ominous and sinister on 
their new errand. That was July 19, 
1870. France had declared war on 
Prussia that day. Mobilization was be- 
ginning before my eyes. I was ten. 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 9 

Dates and anniversaries also perform 
the same office as music and perfumes. 
This is the ninth of June. This day, 
last year, I was in the heart of Ger- 
many. The beautiful, peaceful scene is 
plain yet. It seems as if I never could 
forget it or cease to love it. Often 
last June I thought how different the 
sights I was then seeing were from those 
twenty-one locomotives rolling their 
heavy threat along the banks of the 
Rhine. And, for the mere curiosity 
of it, I looked in my German diary to 
find if I had recorded anything on last 
June ninth that should be worth repeat- 
ing on this June ninth. 

Well, at the end of the day's jotted 
routine were the following sentences: 
"I am constantly more impressed with 
the Germans. They are a massive, on- 



10 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

going, steady race. Some unifying slow 
fire is at work in them. This can be 
felt, somehow." Such was my American 
impression, innocent altogether, deeply 
innocent, and ignorant of what the 
slow fire was going to become. So 
were the peasants and the other humbler 
subjects of the Empire who gave me this 
daily impression; they were innocent 
and ignorant too. Therefore is the 
German tragedy deeper even than the 
Belgian. 

On June twenty-eighth I was still in 
the heart of Germany, but at another 
beautiful place, where further signs of 
Germany's great thrift, order and com- 
petence had met me at every turn. It 
was a Sunday, cloudless and hot, with 
the mountains full of odors from the 
pines. After two hours of strolling I 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 11 

reentered our hotel to find a group of 
travelers before the bulletin board. 
Here we read in silence the news of a 
political assassination. The silence was 
prolonged, not because this news touched 
any of us nationally but because any 
such crime must touch and shock all 
thoughtful persons. 

At last the silence was broken by an 
old German traveler, who said : " That 
is the match which will set all Europe 
in a blaze." We did not know who 
he was. None of our party ever knew. 
On the next morning this party took 
its untroubled way toward France, a 
party of innocent, ignorant Americans, 
in whose minds lingered no thought of 
the old German's remark. That even- 
ing we slept in Rheims. Our windows 
opened opposite the quiet cathedral. 



12 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

It towered far above them into the 
night and sky, its presence filling our 
rooms with a serene and grave bene- 
diction. Just to see it from one's 
pillow gave to one's thoughts the quality 
of prayer. 

Two days later I took my leave of it 
by sitting for a silent hour alone beneath 
its solemn nave. I can never be too 
glad that I bade it this good-by. Not 
long afterward — only thirty-two days 
— we recollected the old German's re- 
mark, for suddenly it came true. He 
had known whereof he spoke. On Au- 
gust 1, 1914, Europe fell to pieces; and 
during August, 1915, in a few weeks 
from to-day, the anniversaries will be- 
gin — public anniversaries and private. 
These, like perfumes, like music, will 
waken legions of visions. The days of 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 13 

the calendar, succeeding one another, 
will ring in the memories of hundreds 
and thousands like bells. Each date 
will invest its day and the sun or the 
rain thereof with special, pregnant re- 
lation to the bereft and the mourning 
of many faiths and languages. Thus 
all Europe will be tolling with memorial 
knells inaudible, yet which in those 
ears that hear them will sound louder 
than any noise of shrapnel or calamity. 



II 



c 



n 

ALAMITY, like those far-off 
locomotives on the Rhine, has 
again rolled out of Germany 
on her neighbors. Yet this very Calam- 
ity it is that has given me back my 
faith in my own country. It was Ger- 
many at peace which shook my faith; 
and I must tell you of that peaceful, 
beautiful Germany in which I rejoiced 
for so many days, and of how I envied 
it. Then, perhaps, among some other 
things I hope you will see, you will see 
that it is Germany who is, in truth, the 
deepest tragedy of this war. 
The Germany at peace that I saw 

during May and June, 1914, was, in 
b 17 



18 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

the first place, a constant pleasure to 
the eye, a constant repose to the body 
and mind. Look where you might, 
beauty was in some form to be seen, 
given its chance by the intelligence of 
man — not defaced, but made the most 
of; and, whether in towns or in the 
country, a harmonious spectacle was 
the rule. I thought of our landscape, 
littered with rubbish and careless fences 
and stumps of trees, hideous with glar- 
ing advertisements; of the rusty junk 
lying about our farms and towns and 
wayside stations; and of the disfigured 
Palisades along the Hudson River. 
America was ugly and shabby — made 
so by Americans; Germany was swept 
and garnished — made so by Germans. 
In Nauheim the admirable courtyard 
of the bathhouses was matched by the 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 19 

admirable system within. The conven- 
ience and the architecture were equally 
good. For every hour of the invalid's 
day the secret of his well-being seemed 
to have been thought out. On one side 
of the group and court of baths ran the 
chief street, shady and well-kempt, with 
its hotels and its very entertaining shops ; 
on the other side spread a park. This 
was a truly gracious little region, em- 
bowered in trees, with spaces and walks 
and flowers all near at hand, yet nothing 
crowded. The park sloped upward to 
a terrace and casino, with tables for 
sitting out to eat and drink and hear 
the band, and with a concert hall and 
theater for the evening. Herein come- 
dies and little operas and music, both 
serious and light, were played. 

Nothing was far from anything; the 



20 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

baths, the doctors, the hotels, the music, 
the tennis courts, the lake, the golf links 
— all were fitted into a scheme laid out 
with marvelous capability. Various hills 
and forests, a little more distant, pro- 
vided walks for those robust enough to 
take them, while longer excursions in 
carriages or motor cars over miles of 
excellent roads were all mapped out 
and tariffed in a terse but comprehensive 
guidebook. Such was living at Nauheim. 
Dying, I feel sure, was equally well ar- 
ranged ; it was never allowed to obtrude 
itself on living. 

Each day began with an early hour 
of routine, walking and water-drinking 
before breakfast, amid surroundings 
equally well planned — an arcade in- 
closing a large level space, with an ex- 
panse of water, a band playing, flowers 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 21 

growing in the open, cut flowers for sale 
in the arcade and comfortable seats 
where the doctor permitted pausing, 
but no permanent settling down. Thus 
went the whole day. Everything was 
well planned and everything worked. I 
thought of America, where so many 
things look beautiful on paper and so 
few things work, because nobody keeps 
the rules. I thought of our college 
elective system, by which every boy 
was free to study what best fitted him 
for his career, and nearly every boy 
did study what he could most easily 
pass examinations in. There was no 
elective system in Nauheim. Every- 
body kept the rules. There was no 
breakdown, no failure. 

Moreover, the civility of the various 
ministrants to the invalid, from the 



22 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

eminent professor-doctor down through 
hotel porters and bath attendants to 
the elevator boy, was well-nigh perfect. 
If you asked for something out of the 
routine, either it was permitted or it 
was satisfactorily explained why it could 
not be permitted. Whether at the bank, 
the bookshop, the hotel, the railway 
station or in the street, your questions 
were not merely understood — the Ger- 
mans knew the answers to them. And 
every day the street was charming with 
fresh flowers and fresh fruit in abundance 
at many corners and booths — cherries, 
strawberries, plums, apricots, grapes, 
both cheap and good, as here they never 
are. But the great luxury, the great 
repose, was that each person fitted his 
job, did it well, took it seriously. After 
our American way of taking it as a joke, 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 23 

particularly when you fumble it, this 
German way was almost enough to 
cure a sick man without further treat- 
ment. 



Ill 



Ill 



^^ liHIS serenity of living was not 
got up for the stranger; it 
1 | was not to meet his market 
that a complex and artificial ease had 
been constructed, bearing no relation to 
what lay beyond its limits. That sort 
of thing is to be found among ourselves 
in isolated spots, though far less perfect 
and far more expensive. Nauheim was 
merely a blossom on the general tree. 
It was when I began my walks in the 
country and found everywhere a corre- 
sponding, ordered excellence, and came 
to talk more and more with the peasants 
and to notice the men, women and chil- 
dren, that the scheme of Germany grew 
impressive to me. 

27 



28 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

So had it not been in 1870, as I looked 
back on my early impressions, reading 
them now in my maturer judgment's 
light. So had it not been even in 1882 
and 1883, when I had again seen the 
country. We various invalids of Nau- 
heim presently began to compare notes. 
All of us were going about the country, 
among the gardens and the farms, or 
across the plain through the fruit trees 
to little Friedberg on its hill — an old 
castle, a steep village, a clean Teutonic 
gem, dropped perfect out of the Middle 
Ages into the present, yet perfectly 
keeping up with the present. Many 
of the peasants in the plain, men and 
women, were of those who brought 
their flowers and produce to sell in 
Nauheim — humble people, poor in what 
you call worldly goods, but seemingly 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 29 

very few of them poor in the great es- 
sential possession. 

We invalids compared notes and 
found ourselves all of one mind. Ten 
or twelve of us were, at the several 
hotels, acquaintances at home ; every one 
had been struck with the contentment 
in the German face. Contentment ! 
Among the old and young of both 
sexes this was the dominating note, 
the great essential possession. The 
question arose: What is the best sign 
that a government is doing well by its 
people — is agreeing with its people, 
so to speak? None of us were quite 
so sure as we used to be that our native 
formula, "Of the people, by the people, 
for the people," is the universal ultimate 
truth. 

Twice two is four, wherever you go; 



30 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

this is as certain in Berlin as it is at 
Washington or in the cannibal islands. 
But, until mankind grows uniform, can 
government be treated as you treat 
mathematics? Until mankind grows 
uniform, will any form of government 
be likely to fit the whole world like a 
glove? So long as mankind continues 
as various as men's digestions, better 
to look at government as if it were a sort 
of diet or treatment. How is the gov- 
ernment agreeing with its people? This 
is the question to ask in each country. 
And what is the surest sign? Could 
any sign be surer than the general ex- 
pression, the composite face of the 
people themselves? This goes deeper 
than skyscrapers and other material 
aspects. 
I had sailed away from skyscrapers 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 31 

and limited expresses; from farmers 
sowing crops wastefully; from houses 
burned through carelessness; from 
forests burned through carelessness; 
from heaps of fruit rotting on the ground 
in one place and hundreds of men hungry 
in another place. I had sailed away 
from the city face and the country face 
of America, and neither one was the 
face of content. They looked driven, 
unpeaceful, dissatisfied. The hasty 
American was not looking after his 
country himself, and nobody was there 
to make him look after it while he rushed 
about climbing, climbing — and to what ? 
A higher skyscraper. It was very rest- 
ful to come to a place where the spirit of 
man was in stable equilibrium; where 
man's lot was in stable equilibrium; 
where never a schoolboy had been told 



32 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

he might become President and every 
schoolboy knew he could not be Emperor. 

The students on a walking holiday 
from their universities often wandered 
singing through Nauheim. Somewhat 
Tyrolese in get-up, sometimes with odd, 
Byronic collars, too much open at the 
neck, they wore their knapsacks and the 
caps that showed their guild. They 
came generally in the early morning 
while the invalids were strolling at the 
Sprudel. The sound of their young 
voices singing in part-chorus would be 
heard, growing near, passing close, then 
dying away melodiously among the trees. 

A single little sharp discord vibrated 
through all this German harmony one 
day when I learned that in the Empire 
more children committed suicide than 
in any other country. 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 33 

But soon this discord was lost amid 
the massive Teutonic polyphony of well- 
being. Of this well-being knowledge 
was enlarged by excursions to various 
towns. To Worms, for instance, that 
we might see the famous Luther Monu- 
ment. Part of the journey thither lay 
through a fine forest. This the city 
of Frankfurt-am-Main owns and has 
forested for seven hundred years; using 
the wood all the time, but so wisely 
that the supply has maintained itself 
against the demand. I thought of our 
own forests, looted and leveled, and of 
ourselves boasting our glorious future 
while we obliterated that future's re- 
sources. Frankfurt was there to teach 
us better, had we chosen to learn. 



IV 



IV 

N Frankfurt-am-Main was born 
one of the three supreme poets 
since Greece and Rome — Goethe 
— from whom I shall quote more than 
once; but Frankfurt has present glories 
that I saw. It is one of many beauti- 
fully governed German cities. I grew 
even fond of its Union Station, since 
through this gate I entered so often the 
pleasures and edifications of the town. 
The trains were a symbol of the whole 
Empire. About a mile north of Nauheim 
the railroad passes under a bridge and 
curves out of sight. The four-fifteen 
was apt to be my express to Frankfurt. 
I would stand on the platform, watch in 
hand, looking northward for my train. 
37 



38 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

At four-eleven the bridge was invariably 
an empty hole. Invariably at four- 
twelve the engine filled the hole; then 
the train glided in quietly, and smoothly 
glided on, almost punctual to the second. 
So did the other trains. 

The conductors were officials of dis- 
ciplined courtesy and informed minds. 
They appeared at the door of your 
compartment, erect, requesting your 
ticket in an established formula. If 
you asked them something they told 
you correctly and with a Teutonic 
adequacy that was grave, but not gruff. 
Once only in a score of journeys did I 
encounter bad manners. Now I should 
never choose these admirable conduc- 
tors for companions, but as conductors 
they were superior to the engaging 
fellow citizen who took my ticket down 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 39 

in Georgia and, when I asked did his 
train usually make its scheduled con- 
nection at Yemassee Junction, cried 
out with contagious mirth: 

"My Lawd, suh, 'most nevah!" 
In these German trains another little 
discord jarred with some regularity: 
the German passengers they brought 
from Berlin, or were taking back to 
Berlin, were of a heavy impenetrable 
rudeness — quite another breed than 
the kindly Hessians of Frankfurt. 

We know the saying of a floor — that 
it is so clean "you could eat your dinner 
off it." All the streets of Frankfurt, 
that I saw, were clean like this. The 
system of street cars was lucid — and 
blessedly noiseless ! — and their conduc- 
tors informed with the same adequate 
gravity I have already noted. 



40 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

I found that I developed a special 
affection for Route 19, because this took 
me from the station to the opera house. 
But all routes took one to and through 
aspects of municipal perfection at which 
one stared with envy as one thought of 
home. 

Oh, yes ! Frankfurt is a name to me 
compact with memories — memories of 
clean streets ; of streets full of by-passers 
who could direct you when you asked 
your way; of streets empty of beggars, 
empty of all signs of desolate, drunken 
or idle poverty; of streets bordered by 
substantial stone dwellings, with fra- 
grant gardens; of excellent shops; the 
streets full of prosperous movement and 
bustle ; an absence of rags, a presence of 
good stout clothes ; a people of contented 
faces, whether they talked or were silent 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 41 

— the same firm and broad contentment, 
like a tree deep-rooted, in the city face 
that was in the country face. 

These burghers, these Frankfurters, 
seemed to be going about their business 
with a sort of solid yet placid energy, 
well and deliberately aimed, that would 
hit the mark at once without wasting 
powder. It was very different and very 
superior to the ill-arranged and hectic 
haste of New York and Chicago; here 
nobody seemed driven as though by 
invisible furies — the German business 
mind was not out of breath. 

Such are my memories of Frankfurt 
at work. Frankfurt at leisure was to be 
seen in its Palm Garden. This was the 
town's place of general recreation ; large, 
various, beautifully and intelligently 
planned; with space for babies to roll 



42 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

in safety, and there were the babies roll- 
ing, and their nurses; with courts for 
tennis, and thither I saw adolescent 
Frankfurt strolling in flannels and short 
skirts after business hours ; with benches 
where sat the more elderly, taking the air 
and gazing at the games or the flowers 
or the pleasant trees; with paths more 
sequestered that wound among bowers, 
convenient for sweethearts — but I did 
not see any, because I forbore to look. A 
central building held tropic plants and 
basins, and large rooms for bad weather, 
I suppose, with a restaurant; but on 
this fine day the music played and we 
dined outside. 

An entrance fee, very small, served to 
make you respect the Palm Garden, since 
humanity seldom respects what it pays 
nothing for. Most unexpected show of 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 43 

all in this Palm Garden were the flowers 
under glass. I had erroneously supposed 
that any German scheme of color would 
be heavy, and possibly garish. Never 
had I beheld more exquisite subtlety on 
so extended a scale of arrangement. 
One walked through aisle after aisle of 
roses and other blooms in these green- 
houses — everywhere was the same deli- 
cate sense and feeling ; the same, in fact, 
in these flower schemes that one finds in 
German lyric verse, and in the songs of 
Schubert, Schumann and Franz. 

It was in the opera house — Frankfurt 
has a fine and commodious one — that 
my whole impression of Germany's glory 
culminated. The performances drew 
their light from no Melbas or Carusos, 
or other meteors, but from a fixed con- 
stellation, now and then enriched by 



44 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

some visitor ; it was teamwork of drilled 
and even • excellence, singers, chorus, 
orchestra and scenery unitedly equal to 
the occasion, in operas old and new, an 
immense sweep of repertory, with an 
audience to match — an accustomed au- 
dience, to whom music was traditional 
food, music having always grown here- 
about plenteously, indigenously, so that 
they took it as naturally as they took 
their Rhine wine, paying for it as moder- 
ately, going to hear it in rather plain 
clothes, as a rule — men in day dress, 
women in high-neck; not an audience 
that had to put on its diamonds in order 
to listen conspicuously to a costly and 
not comprehended exotic. 

The difference between hearing opera 
where it grows and hearing it in New 
York is the difference between eating 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 45 

strawberries warm from their vines in 
June and strawberries in January that 
have come a thousand miles by freight. 
Where opera grows, it is the blend of 
native music, singers and listeners that 
gives a ripe flavor of a warmth which 
Fifth Avenue can never purchase. 

This, every performance in Frankfurt 
had; but even this could be raised to a 
higher key of inspiration. I walked in 
one night and found myself amid a pious 
ceremonial. They were giving an old 
work, of bygone design, stiff in outline, 
noble, remote from all present things. 
Why did they revive this somewhat pale 
and rigid classic ? For contrast, variety ? 
Not at all. Two hundred years ago this 
day, Gluck had been born. Gluck had 
written this opera. For this reason, 
then, Frankfurt was assembled to heal 



46 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Gluck's music and remember him; and, 
as I looked at these living Germans honor- 
ing their classics, I thought it was truly 
a splendid people that not only possessed 
but practically nourished themselves with 
these masterpieces of their great dead. 

But this was not all. This was Ger- 
many looking at its Past. In the Frank- 
furt opera house I also learned one of the 
ways in which Germany attends to its 
Future. It was on a Sunday afternoon. 
As I crossed the open space toward the 
opera house it seemed as though I were 
the only grown person bound there. 
Children by threes and fours, and in little 
groups, were streaming from every quar- 
ter, entering every door, tripping up the 
wide, handsome stairs, filling all the seats 
— boys and girls ; it was like the Pied 
Piper of Hamelin. After a few minutes 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 47 

I found that I was indeed almost alone 
amid a rippling sea of children — nearly 
two thousand, as I later learned. In the 
boxes here and there was a parent or 
two with a family party, and dotted 
about the house a few scattered older 
heads among the young ones. 

The overture began. "Hush!" went 
several little voices; the sprightly, ex- 
pectant Babel fell to silence; they 
listened like a congregation in church. 

Then the curtain rose. It was a gay 
old opera, tuneful, full of boisterous, in- 
nocent comedy and simple sentiment. 
Not Gluck this time ; Gluck would have 
been a trifle severe for their young un- 
derstandings. The enthusiasm and the 
attention of these boys and girls, with 
their clapping of hands and their laugh- 
ter, soon affected the spirits of the singers 



48 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

as a radiant day in spring ; it affected me. 
I envied the happy parents who had their 
children round them; it was like some 
sort of wonderful April light. Beneath 
it the quaint, sweet old opera shone like 
a fruit tree in blossom. The actors 
became as children again themselves ; so 
did the fiddlers; so did the conductor. 
I doubt if that little old opera, Czaar und 
Zimmermann, had ever felt younger in 
its life; and I thought if the spirit of 
Goethe were watching Frankfurt, his 
city, to-day, it would add a new happi- 
ness to a moment of his Eternity. 

Between the acts I was full of ques- 
tions. What occasion was this? I read 
the program, wherein was set forth a most 
interesting account of the composer — 
his character, life and adventures, with a 
historic account also of Peter the Great, 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 49 

the hero of the opera ; but nothing about 
the occasion. So in the lobby I ad- 
dressed myself to a group of the men 
I had seen dotted among the rows of 
children. The men were schoolmasters. 
The occasion was an experiment. The 
children were of the public schools of 
Frankfurt — not the oldest scholars, but 
the middle grades of the schools. For 
the oldest, Frankfurt had already pro- 
vided opera days, but this was the first 
ever given for these younger boys and 
girls. The cost was twelve-and-a-half 
cents a seat. If it proved a success, a 
second would follow in two weeks. At 
the theater, throughout each winter 
school term, plays were given expressly 
for them in this way — the great German 
classics; but never any opera before 
to-day. 



50 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Well, the performance went on ; but I 
was obliged, near the end of it, to hasten 
away to my train for Nauheim, most re- 
luctantly leaving the sight and company 
of those two thousand joyous children of 
the Frankfurt public schools. "Rosy 
cheeks predominated; eyeglasses were 
rare." — Again I quote from my own 
diary: — "The children seemed between 
ten and fifteen. The boys had good fore- 
heads and big backs to their heads." 



N 



OTHING can efface this mem- 
ory, nothing can efface the 
whole impression of Germany ; 
in retrospect this picture rises clear — 
the fair aspect and order of the country 
and the cities, the well-being of the 
people, their contented faces, their 
grave adequacy, their kindliness; and, 
crowning all material prosperity, the feel- 
ing for beauty as shown by their gardens, 
and, better and more important still, the 
reverent value for their great native 
poets and musicians, so attentive, so 
cherishing, seeing to it that the young 
generation began early its acquaintance 
with the masterpieces that are Germany's 
heritage of inspiration. 
53 



54 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Such was the splendor of this empire as 
it unrolled before me through May and 
June, 1914, that by contrast the state 
of its two great neighbors, France and 
England, seemed distressing and unen- 
viable. Paris was shabby and incoherent, 
London full of unrest. Instead of Ger- 
many's order, confusion prevailed in 
France ; instead of Germany's placidity, 
disturbance prevailed in England; and 
in both France and England incompetence 
seemed the chief note. The French face, 
alike in city or country, was too often a 
face of worried sadness or revolt; men 
spoke of political scandals and dissensions 
petty and unpatriotic in spirit, and a 
political trial, revealing depths of every 
sort of baseness and dishonor, filled the 
newspapers; while in England, besides 
discord of suffrage and discord of labor, 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 55 

civil war seemed so imminent that no 
one would have been surprised to hear of 
it any day. 

So that I thought: Suppose a soul, 
arrived on earth from another world, 
wholly ignorant of earth, without any 
mortal ties whatever, were given its choice 
after a survey of the nations, which it 
should be born in and belong to? In 
May, June and July, 1914, my choice 
would have been, not France, not Eng- 
land, not America, but Germany. 

It was on the seventh day of June, 
1914, that Frankfurt assembled her school 
children in the opera house, to further 
their taste and understanding of Ger- 
many's supreme national art. Exactly 
eleven months later, on May 7, 1915, a 
German torpedo sank the Lusitania ; and 
the cities of the Rhine celebrated this also 
for their school children. 



VI 



VI 



T 



HE world is in agony. We wit- 
ness the most terrible catas- 
trophe known to mankind — 
most terrible, not from its huge size, 
but because it is a moral catastrophe. 
Through centuries of suffering and 
cruelty, guided by religion, we thought 
we had attained to knowledge of and 
belief in a public right between nations, 
and an honorable warfare, if warfare 
must be. This has been shattered to 
pieces. No need to investigate further 
the atrocities at Liege or Louvain. 
These and more have indeed been amply 
proved, but what need of proof after the 
Lusitania school festival? In that holi- 
59 



60 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

day we see the feast of Kultur, the Teu- 
tonic climax. How came it to pass ? Is 
it the same Germany who gave those two 
holidays to her school children? The 
opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy of 
barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the 
deep basses of the fathers and shrill with 
the trebles of their young ? Their young, 
to whom they teach one day the gentle 
melodies of Lortzing, and to exult in 
world-assassination on another? 

Goethe said — and the words glow 
with new prophetic light : " Germans are 
of yesterday ; . . . a few centuries must 
still elapse before ... it will be said 
of them, 'It is long since they were 
barbarians.'" And again: "National 
hatred is a peculiar thing. You will 
always find it strongest and most violent 
where there is the lowest degree of Kul- 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 61 

tur." But how came it to pass? Do 
the two holidays proceed from the same 
Kultur, the same Fatherland? 

They do; and nothing in the whole 
story of mankind is more strange than 
the case of Germany — how Germany 
through generations has been carefully 
trained for this wild spring at the throat 
of Europe that she has made. The Ser- 
vian assassination has nothing to do 
with it, save that it accidentally struck 
the hour. Months and years before 
that, Germany was crouching for her 
spring. In one respect the war she has 
incubated is the old assault of Xerxes, 
of Alexander, of Napoleon, of every one 
who has been visited by the dangerous 
dream of world conquest. Only, never 
before has the dream been taught to a 
people on such a scale, not merely be- 



62 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

cause of the vast modern apparatus, but 
much more because no subjects of any 
despot have ever been so politically docile 
and credulous as the Germans. 

In another respect this war resembles 
strikingly our own and the French Revo- 
lution. All three were prepared and 
fomented by books, by teachings from 
books. The American brain seized hold 
of certain doctrines and generalizations 
of Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui and 
Beccaria concerning the rights of man 
and the consent of the governed. The 
French brain nourished and inspired 
itself with some theorems of the ency- 
clopedists and of Rousseau about man's 
natural innocence and the social con- 
tract. The Teutonic brain assimilated 
some diplomatic and philosophic pre- 
cepts laid down by Machiavelli, 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 63 

Nietzsche and Treitschke. Indeed, 
Fichte, during the Winter of 1807-08, 
at the University of Berlin, made an 
address to the German people which 
may be accounted the first famous aca- 
demic harbinger and source of the present 
Teutonic state of mind. Here the 
parallel stops. With America and 
France, war made way for independence, 
liberty and freedom, political and moral ; 
Germany would establish everywhere her 
absolute military despotism. We shall 
reach in due course the full statement of 
her creed ; we are not ready for it yet. 



VII 



VII 



o 



FTEN of late I have thought 
of those twenty-one locomo- 
tives moving along the bank 
of the Rhine. They were a symbol. 
They stood for the House of Hohen- 
zollern; they carried Caesar and all 
his fortunes, which had begun long 
before locomotives were invented. July 
19, 1870, is one of the dates that does not 
remain of the same size, but grows, has 
not done growing yet, will be one of His- 
tory's enormous dates before it is done 
growing. The heavier descendants of 
those locomotives have been lugging to 
France a larger destruction, and more 
hideous, than their ancestors dragged 
67 



68 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

there; but this new freight belongs to 
the same haul, forms part of one vast 
organic materialistic growth, and spiritual 
eclipse, of which 1870 and 1914 are im- 
portant parts, but by no means the 
whole. 

Woven with it is the struggle of 
nations for the possession of their own 
soul. Consider 1870 in this light: 
Through that war France took her soul 
out of the custody of an Emperor and 
handed it to the people; through the 
same war Germany placed her soul in 
the hands of an Emperor. Defeated 
France, rid of her Bonapartes; victori- 
ous Germany, shackled to her Hohen- 
zollern ! In the light of forty-five years 
how those two opposite actions gleam 
with significance, and how in the same 
light the two words defeat and victory 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 69 

grow lambent with shifting import ! 
Unless our democratic faith be vain, 
France walked forward then, and Ger- 
many backward. But this did not seem 
so last June. 



VIII 



H 



VIII 

AD it not culminated before 
our eyes, the case of Ger- 
many would be perfectly 
incredible. As it stands to-day, the 
truly incredible thing is that she should 
have made her spring at the throat of 
an unexpecting, unprepared world. 
Now that she has sprung, the diagnosis 
of her case has been often and ably made 
— before the event, Dr. Charles Sarolea, 
a Belgian gentleman, made it notably; 
but prophets are seldom recognized 
except by posterity. The case of Ger- 
many is a hospital case, a case for the 
alienist ; the mania of grandeur, comple- 
mented by the mania of persecution. 
73 



74 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Very well do I remember the first 
dawning hint I had of this diseased men- 
tal state. It was Wednesday, August 5, 
1914. We were in mid-ocean. Before 
the bulletin board we passengers were 
clustered to read that day's marconigram 
and learn what more of Europe had 
fallen to pieces since yesterday. This 
morning was posted the Kaiser's proc- 
lamation, quoting Hamlet, calling on his 
subjects "to be or not to be," and to 
defy a world conspired against them. 
In these words there was such a wild, 
incoherent ring of exaltation that I said 
to a friend : " Can he be off his head ? " 

Later in that vpyage we sped silent 
and unlanterned through the fog from 
two German cruisers, of which nobody 
seemed personally afraid but one 
stewardess. She said: "They're all 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 75 

wild beasts. They would send us all to 
the bottom. " No one believed her. 
Since then we believe her. Since then 
we have heard the wild incoherent ring in 
many German voices besides the Kaiser's, 
and we know to-day that Germany's 
mania is analogous to those mental epi- 
demics of the Middle Ages, when fanati- 
cism, usually religious, sent entire com- 
munities into various forms of madness. 
The case of Germany is the Prussian- 
izing of Germany. Long after all of 
us are gone, men will still be studying 
this war; and, whatever responsibility 
for it be apportioned among the nations, 
the huge weight and bulk of guilt will 
be laid on Prussia and the Hohenzollern 
— unless, indeed, it befall that Germany 
conquer the world and the Kaiser dic- 
tate his version of History to us all, 



76 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

suppressing all other versions, as he 
has conducted the training of his sub- 
jects since 1888. But this will not be; 
whatever comes first, this cannot be 
the end. If I believed that the earth 
would be Prussianized, life would cease 
to be desirable. 

To me the whole case of Germany, 
the whole process, seems a fatalistic 
thing, destined, inevitable ; cosmic forces 
above and beyond men's comprehension 
flooding this northern land with their 
high tide, as once they flooded southern 
coasts; giving to this Teuton race its 
turn, its day, its hour of white heat 
and of bloom, its temperamental great- 
ness, its strength and excess of vital 
sap, intellectual, procreative — all this 
grandeur to be hurled into tragedy by 
its own action. 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 77 

The process goes back a long way 
behind Napoleon — who stayed it for 
a while — to years when we see the 
Germany of the Reformation, Poetry, 
Music, the grand Germany, blossoming 
in the very same moment that the 
Prussian poison was also germinating. 
About 1830, Heine perceived and wrote 
scornfully concerning the new and evil 
influence. This was a germination of 
state and family ambition combined, fer- 
menting at last into lust for world do- 
minion. It grows quite visible first in 
Frederick the Great. By him the Prus- 
sian state of mind and international ethics 
began to be formulated. By force and 
fraud he annexed weak peoples' territory. 
He cut Poland's body in three, blas- 
phemously inviting Russia and Austria 
to partake with him of his Eucharist. 



78 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Theft has followed theft since Freder- 
ick's. His cynical, strong spirit guided 
Prussia after Waterloo, guided first the 
predecessor of Bismarck and next Bis- 
marck himself, with his stealing of 
Schleswig-Holstein, his dishonest muti- 
lation of the telegram at Ems and the 
subsequent rape of Alsace and Lorraine 
in 1870. Very plain it is to see now, 
and very sad, why the small separate 
German states that had indeed produced 
their giants — their Luthers, Goethes, 
Beethovens — but had always suffered 
military defeat, had been the shambles 
of their conquerors for centuries, should 
after 1870 hail their new-created 
Emperor. Had he not led them united 
to the first glory and conquest they 
had ever known? Had he not got 
them back Alsace and Lorraine, which 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 79 

France had stolen from them two hun- 
dred years ago? So they handed their 
soul to the Hohenzollern. This marks 
the beginning of the end. 



IX 



IX 



| |E can hardly emphasize too 
V/V much, or sufficiently under- 

' I line, the moral effect of 
1870 on the German nature, the in- 
fluence it had on the German mind. 
It is essential to a clear understanding 
of the full Prussianizing process that 
now set in. On the German's innate 
docility and credulity many have dwelt, 
but few on what 1870 did to this. Only 
with Bismarck's quick, tremendous vic- 
tory over France as the final explanation 
is the abject and servile faith that the 
Germans thenceforth put in Prussia 
rendered conceivable to reason. They 
blindly swallowed the sham that Bis- 
marck gave them as universal suffrage, 
83 



84 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

They swallowed extreme political and 
military restraint. They swallowed a 
rigid compulsion in schools, which led 
to the excess in child suicide I have 
mentioned. They swallowed a state of 
life where outside the indicated limits 
almost nothing was permitted and 
almost everything was forbidden. 

But all this proscription is merely 
material and has been attended by 
great material welfare. Intellectual 
speculation was apparently unfettered; 
but he who dared philosophize about 
Liberty and the Divine right of Kings 
found it was not. Prussia put its uni- 
form not only on German bodies but 
on their brains. Literature and music 
grew correspondingly sterilized. Drama, 
fiction, poetry and the comic papers 
became invaded by a new violence and 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 85 

a new, heavy obscenity. Impatience 
with the noble German classics was 
bred by Prussia. What wonder, since 
freedom was their essence? 

Beethoven, after Napoleon made him- 
self Emperor, tore off the dedication of 
his " Eroica " symphony to Napoleon. 
And Goethe had said : " Napoleon affords 
us an example of the danger of elevating 
oneself to the Absolute and sacrificing 
everything to the carrying out of an 
idea." Goethe fell frankly out of date in 
Berlin. Symphony orchestras could no 
longer properly interpret Mozart and 
Beethoven. A strange blend of frivolity 
and bestiality began to pervade the 
whole realm of German art. Scientific 
eminence degenerated pari passu. No 
originator of the dimensions of Helm- 
holtz was produced, but a herd of dili- 



86 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

gent and thorough workers-out of the ideas 
got from England — like the aniline dyes 
— or from France — like the Wassermann 
tests — and seldom credited to their 
sources. So poor grew the academic 
tone at Berlin that a Munich professor 
declined an offer of promotion thither. 

For forty years German school chil- 
dren and university students sat in the 
thickening fumes that exhaled from 
Berlin, spread everywhere by professors 
chosen at the fountainhead. Any pro- 
fessor or editor who dared speak any- 
thing not dictated by Prussia, for 
German credulity to write down on its 
slate, was dealt with as a heretic. 

Out of the fumes emerged three 
colossal shapes — the Super-man, the 
Super-race and the Super-state : the 
new Trinity of German worship. 



X 



X 



I HUS was Germany shut in from 

I the world. Even her Socialist- 

' I Democrats abjectly conformed. 
China built a stone wall, Germany a wall 
of the mind. 

To assert that any great nation has 
in these modern days deliberately built 
around herself such a wall, may seem 
an extreme statement, and I will there- 
fore support it with an instance — only 
one instance out of many, out of hun- 
dreds ; it will suffice to indicate the sort 
of information about the world lying 
outside the wall that Germany has 
carefully prepared for the children in 
her schools. I quote from the letter 



90 THE. PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

of an American parent recently living in 
Berlin, who placed his children in a 
school there: "The text books were 
unique. I suppose there was not in 
any book of physics or chemistry that 
they studied an admission that a citi- 
zen of some other country had taken 
any forward step; every step was by 
some line of argument assigned to a 
German. As you might expect, the 
history of the modern world is the work 
of German Heroes. The oddest ex- 
ample, however, was the geography 
used by Katherine. (His daughter, aged 
thirteen.) This contained maps indi- 
cating the Deutsche Gebiete (the Ger- 
man "spheres of influence" in foreign 
lands) in striking colors. In North 
and South America, including the United 
States and Canada, there are said to be 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 91 

three classes of inhabitants — negroes, 
Indians and Germans. For the United 
States there is a black belt for negroes 
and a middle-west section for Indians; 
but the rest is Deutsche Gebiete. Can- 
ada is occupied mainly by Indians. The 
matter was brought to my attention 
because one of Katherine's girl friends 
asked her whether she was of negro or 
Indian blood; and when she replied 
she was neither her friend pointed out 
that this was impossible for she surely 
was not German." Information less 
laughable about the morals taught in 
the German schools I forbear to quote. 
During forty years Germany sat within 
her wall, learning and repeating Prussian 
incantations. It recalls those savage 
rites where the participants, by shouting 
and by concerted rhythmic movements, 



92 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

work themselves into a frothing state. 
This has befallen Germany. Within 
her wall of moral isolation her sight 
has grown distorted, her sense of pro- 
portion is lost ; a set of reeling delusions 
possesses her — her own greatness, her 
mission of Kultur, her contempt for 
the rest of mankind, her grievance that 
mankind is in league to cramp and sup- 
press her. 

These delusions have been attended 
by their proper Nemesis : Germany has 
misunderstood us all — everybody and 
everything outside her wall. 

Like the bewitched dwarfs in certain 
old magic tales, whose talk reveals their 
evil without their knowing it, Germans 
constantly utter words of the most naif 
and grotesque self-betrayal — as when 
the German ambassador was being es- 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 93 

corted away from England and was 
urged by his escort not to be so down- 
cast; the war being no fault of his. 
He answered in sincere sadness: 

" Oh, you don't realize ! My future 
is broken. I was sent to watch England 
and tell my Emperor the right moment 
for him to strike, when England's in- 
ternal disturbances would make it im- 
possible for her to fight us. I told him 
the moment had come." 

Or again, when a German in Brussels 
said to an American : 

"We were sincerely sorry for Belgium; 
but we feel it is better for that country 
to suffer, even to disappear, than for 
our Empire, so much larger and more 
important, to be torpedoed by our 
treacherous enemies." 

Or again, when Doctor Dernburg 



94 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

shows us why Germany had to murder 
eleven hundred passengers: 

"It has been the custom heretofore 
to take off passengers and crew. . . . 
But a submarine . . . cannot do it. 
The submarine is a frail craft and may 
easily be rammed, and a speedy ship is 
capable of running away from it." 

No more than the dwarf has Germany 
any conception what such candid words 
reveal of herself to ears outside her 
Teutonic wall — that she has walked 
back to the morality of the Stone Age 
and made ancient warfare more hideous 
through the devices of modern science. 

Thus her Nemesis is to misunderstand 
the world. She blundered as to what 
Belgium would do, what France would 
do, what Russia would do; and she 
most desperately blundered as to what 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 95 

England would do. And she expected 
American sympathy. 

Summarized thus, the Prussianizing 
of Germany seems fantastic; fantastic, 
too, and not of the real world, the utter 
credulity, the abject, fervent faith of 
the hypnotized young men. Yet here 
are a young German's recent words. 
I have seen his letter, written to a friend 
of mine. He was tutor to my friend's 
children. Delightful, of admirable edu- 
cation, there was no sign in him of 
hypnotism. He went home to fight. 
There he inhaled afresh the Prussian 
fumes. Presently his letter came, just 
such a letter as one would wish from an 
ardent, sincere, patriotic youth — for 
the first pages. Then the fumes show 
their work and he suddenly breaks out 
in the following intellectual vertigo: 



96 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

" Individual life has become worthless ; 
even the uneducated men feel that 
something greater than individual hap- 
piness is at stake, and the educated know 
that it is the culture of Europe. By 
her shameless lies and cold-blooded 
hypocrisy England has forfeited her 
claim to the title of a country of culture. 
France has passed her prime anyway, 
your country is too far behind in its 
development, the other countries are 
too small to carry on the heritage of 
Greek culture and Christian faith — the 
two main components of every higher 
culture to-day; so we have to do it, 
and we shall do it — even if we and 
millions more of us should have to die." 

There you have it ! A cultivated 
student, a noble nature, a character of 
promise, Prussianized, with millions like 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 97 

him, into a gibbering maniac, and flung 
into a caldron of blood ! Could tragedy 
be deeper? Goethe's young Wilhelm 
Meister thus images the ruin of Ham- 
let's mind and how it came about : 
"An oak tree is planted in a costly vase, 
which should only have borne beautiful 
flowers in its bosom; the roots expand 
and the vase is shattered." Thus has 
Prussia, planted in Germany, cracked 
the Empire. 



XI 



A 



XI 

ND now we are ready for the 
Prussian Creed. The follow- 
ing is an embodiment, a com- 
posite statement, of Prussianism, com- 
piled sentence by sentence from the 
utterances of Prussians, the Kaiser and 
his generals, professors, editors, and 
Nietzsche, part of it said in cold 
blood, years before this war, and all of 
it a declaration of faith now being 
ratified by action: 

"We Hohenzollerns take our crown 
from God alone. On me the Spirit of 
God has descended. I regard my whole 
. . . task as appointed by heaven. Who 
opposes me I shall crush to pieces. 
101 



102 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Nothing must be settled in this world 
without the intervention . . . of . . . 
the German Emperor. He who listens 
to public opinion runs a danger of in- 
flicting immense harm on . . . the State. 
When one occupies certain positions in 
the world one ought to make dupes 
rather than friends. Christian morality 
cannot be political. Treaties are only 
a disguise to conceal other political 
aims. Remember that the German 
people are the chosen of God. 

"Might is right and ... is decided 
by war. Every youth who enters a 
beer-drinking and dueling club will re- 
ceive the true direction of his life. War 
in itself is a good thing. God will see 
to it that war always recurs. The 
efforts directed toward the abolition 
of war must not only be termed foolish, 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 103 

but absolutely immoral. The peace of 
Europe is only a secondary matter for 
us. The sight of suffering does one 
good; the infliction of suffering does 
one more good. This war must be con- 
ducted as ruthlessly as possible. 

"The Belgians should not be shot 
dead. They should be ... so left as 
to make impossible all hope of recovery. 
The troops are to treat the Belgian 
civil population with unrelenting severity 
and frightfulness. Weak nations have 
not the same right to live as powerful 
. . . nations. The world has no longer 
need of little nationalities. We Germans 
have little esteem and less respect . . . 
for Holland. We need to enlarge our 
colonial possessions; such territorial ac- 
quisitions we can only realize at the 
cost of other states. 



104 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

" Russia must no longer be our frontier. 
The Polish press should be annihilated 
. . . likewise the French and Dan- 
ish. . . . The Poles should be allowed 
. . . three privileges: to pay taxes, 
serve in the army, and shut their jaws. 
France must be so completely crushed 
that she will never again cross our path. 
You must remember that we have not 
come to make war on the French people, 
but to bring them the higher Civiliza- 
tion. The French have shown them- 
selves decadent and without respect 
for the Divine law. Against England 
we fight for booty. Our real enemy is 
England. We have to . . . crush ab- 
solutely perfidious Albion . . . subdue 
her to such an extent that her influence 
all over the world is broken forever. 

"German should replace English as 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 105 

the world language. English, the bas- 
tard tongue . . . must be swept into 
the remotest corners . . . until it has 
returned to its original elements of an 
insignificant pirate dialect. The Ger- 
man language acts as a blessing which, 
coming direct from the hand of God, 
sinks into the heart like a precious 
balm. To us, more than any other 
nation, is intrusted the true structure 
of human existence. Our own country, 
by employing military power, has at- 
tained a degree of Culture which it 
could never have reached by peaceful 
means. 

<f The civilization of mankind suffers 
every time a German becomes an Amer- 
ican. Let us drop our miserable at- 
tempts to excuse Germany's action. 
We willed it. Our might shall create 



106 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

a new law in Europe. It is Germany 
that strikes. We are morally and in- 
tellectually superior beyond all com- 
parison. . . . We must . . . fight with 
Russian beasts, English mercenaries and 
Belgian fanatics. We have nothing to 
apologize for. It is no consequence 
whatever if all the monuments ever 
created, all the pictures ever painted, 
all the buildings ever erected by the 
great architects of the world, be de- 
stroyed. . . . The ugliest stone placed 
to mark the burial of a German grenadier 
is a more glorious monument than all 
the cathedrals of Europe put together. 
No respect for the tombs of Shake- 
speare, Newton and Faraday. 

"They call us barbarians. What of 
it ? The German claim must be : . . . 
Education to hate. . . . Organization 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 107 

of hatred. . . . Education to the de- 
sire for hatred. Let us abolish unripe 
and false shame. ... To us is given 
faith, hope and hatred; but hatred is 
the greatest among them." 



XII 



c 



XII 

AN the splendid land of 
Goethe unlearn its Prussian 
lesson and regain its own 
noble sanity, or has it too long inhaled 
the fumes? There is no saying yet. 
Still they sit inside their wall. Like a 
trained chorus they still repeat that 
England made the war, that Louvain 
was not destroyed, that Rheims was 
not bombarded, that their Fatherland 
is the unoffending victim of world- 
jealousy. When travelers ask what 
proofs they have, the trained chorus 
has but one reply: "Our government 
officials tell us so." Berlin, Cologne, 
Munich — all their cities — give this 
111 



112 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

answer to the traveler. Nothing that 
we know do they know. It is kept from 
them. Their brains still wear the Prus- 
sian uniform and go mechanically through 
the Prussian drill. Will adversity lift 
this curse? 

Something happened at Louvain — 
a little thing, but let it give us hope. 
In the house of a professor at the Uni- 
versity some German soldiers were quar- 
tered, friendly, considerate, doing no 
harm. Suddenly one day, in obedience 
to new orders, they fell on this home, 
burned books, wrecked rooms, destroyed 
the house and all its possessions. Its 
master is dead. His wife, looking on 
with her helpless children, saw a soldier 
give an apple to a child. 

"Thank you," she said; "you, at 
least, have a heart." 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 113 

"No, madam," said the German; "it 
is broken." 

Goethe said : " He who wishes to 
exert a useful influence must be careful 
to insult nothing. . . . We are become 
too humane to enjoy the triumphs of 
Caesar." Ninety years after he said 
this Germany took the Belgian women 
from their ruined villages — some of 
these women being so infirm that for 
months they had not been out-of-doors 
— and loaded them on trains like cattle, 
and during several weeks exposed them 
publicly to the jeers and scoffs and in- 
sults of German crowds through city 
after city. 

Perhaps the German soldier whose 
heart was broken by Louvain will be 
one of a legion, and thus, perhaps, 
through thousands of broken German 



114 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

hearts, Germany may become herself 
again. She has hurled calamity on a 
continent. She has struck to pieces a 
Europe whose very unpreparedness an- 
swers her ridiculous falsehood that she 
was attacked first. Never shall Europe 
be again as it was. Our brains, could 
they take in the whole of this war, 
would burst. 

But Calamity has its Pentecost. 
When its mighty wind rushed over 
Belgium and France, and its tongues of 
fire sat on each of them, they, too, like 
the apostles in the New Testament, 
began to speak as the Spirit gave them 
utterance. Their words and deeds have 
filled the world with a splendor the world 
had lost. The flesh, that has dominated 
our day and generation, fell away in 
the presence of the Spirit. I have 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 115 

heard Belgians bless the martyrdom 
and awakening of their nation. They 
have said : 

"Do not talk of our suffering; talk 
of our glory. We have found our- 
selves." 

Frenchmen have said to me: "For 
forty-four years we have been unhappy, 
in darkness, without health, without 
faith, believing the true France dead. 
Resurrection has come to us." I heard 
the French Ambassador, Jules Jusse- 
rand, say in a noble speech : " George 
Eliot profoundly observes that to every 
man comes a crisis when in a moment, 
without chance for reflection, he must 
decide and act instantly. What de- 
termines his decision? His whole past, 
the daily choices between good and evil 
that he has made throughout his previous 



116 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

years — these determine his decision. 
Such a crisis fell in a moment on France ; 
she acted instantly, true to her historic 
honor and courage. " 

Every day deeds of faith, love and 
renunciation are done by the score and 
the hundred which will never be re- 
corded, and every one of which is noble 
enough to make an immortal song. All 
over the broken map of Europe, through 
stricken thousands of square miles, such 
deeds are being done by Servians, Rus- 
sians, Poles, Belgians, French and Eng- 
lish, — yes, and Germans too, — the souls 
of men and women rising above their 
bodies, flinging them away for the sake 
of a cause. Think of one incident only, 
only one of the white-hot gleams of the 
Spirit that have reached us from the 
raging furnace. Out from the burning 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 117 

cathedral of Rheims they were dragging 
the wounded German prisoners lying 
helpless inside on straw that had begun 
to burn. In front of the church the 
French mob was about to shoot or tear 
to pieces those crippled, defenseless 
enemies. You and I might well want 
to kill an enemy who had set fire to 
Mount Vernon, the house of the Father 
of our Country. 

For more than seven hundred years 
that great church of Rheims had been 
the sacred shrine of France. One minute 
more and those Germans lying or crawl- 
ing outside the church door would have 
been destroyed by the furious people. 
But above the crash of rafters and glass, 
the fall of statues, the thunder of bom- 
barding cannon, and the cries of French 
execration, rose one man's voice. There 



118 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

on the steps of the ruined church stood 
a priest. He lifted his arms and said : 

"Stop; remember the ancient ways 
and chivalry of France. It is not French- 
men who trample on a maimed and fallen 
foe. Let us not descend to the level of 
our enemies." 

It was enough. The French remem- 
bered France. Those Germans were 
conveyed in safety to their appointed 
shelter — and far away, across the lands 
and oceans, hearts throbbed and eyes 
grew wet that had never looked on 
Rheims. 

These are the tongues of fire ; this is 
the Pentecost of Calamity. Often it 
must have made brothers again of 
those who found themselves prone on 
the battlefield, neighbors awaiting the 
grave. In Flanders a French officer 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 119 

of cavalry, shot through the chest, lay 
dying, but with life enough still to write 
his story to the lady of his heart. He 
wrote thus: 

"There are two other men lying near 
me, and I do not think there is much 
hope for them either. One is an officer 
of a Scottish regiment and the other a 
private in the uhlans. They were struck 
down after me, and when I came to my- 
self I found them bending over me, 
rendering first aid. The Britisher was 
pouring water down my throat from 
his flask, while the German was en- 
deavoring to stanch my wound with 
an antiseptic preparation served out to 
their troops by the medical corps. The 
Highlander had one of his legs shattered, 
and the German had several pieces of 
shrapnel buried in his side. 



120 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

" In spite of their own sufferings, they 
were trying to help me; and when I 
was fully conscious again the German 
gave us a morphia injection and took 
one himself. His medical corps had 
also provided him with the injection 
and the needle, together with printed 
instructions for their use. After the 
injection, feeling wonderfully at ease, 
we spoke of the lives we had lived before 
the war. We all spoke English, and we 
talked of the women we had left at home. 
Both the German and the Britisher had 
been married only a year. . . . 

" I wondered — and I suppose the 
others did — why we had fought each 
other at all. I looked at the High- 
lander, who was falling to sleep, ex- 
hausted, and, in spite of his drawn 
face and mud-stained uniform, he looked 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 121 

the embodiment of freedom. Then I 
thought of the Tricolor of France and 
all that France had done for liberty. 
Then I watched the German, who had 
ceased to speak. He had taken a prayer 
book from his knapsack, and was try- 
ing to read a service for soldiers wounded 
in battle. And . . . while I watched 
him I realized what we were fighting 
for. . . . He was dying in vain, while the 
Britisher and myself, by our deaths, would 
probably contribute something toward 
the cause of civilization and peace." 

Thus wrote this young French officer 
of cavalry to the lady of his heart, the 
American lady to whom he was engaged. 
The Red Cross found the letter at his 
side. Through it she learned the man- 
ner of his death. This, too, is the 
Pentecost of Calamity. 



XIII 



A 



XIII 

ND what do the women say 
— the women who lose such 
men? Thus do they decline 
to attend at The Hague the Peace Con- 
gress of foolish women who have lost 
nobody : 

" How would it be possible, in an hour 
like this, for us to meet women of the 
enemy's countries ? . . . Have they dis- 
avowed the . . . crimes of their govern- 
ment? Have they protested against 
the violation of Belgium's neutrality? 
Against offenses to the law of nations? 
Against the crimes of their army and 
navy ? If their voices had been raised 
it was too feebly for the echo of their 
125 



126 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

protest to reach us across our violated 
and devastated territories. . . ." 

And one celebrated lady writes to a 
delegate at The Hague : 

" Madam, are you really English ? . . . 
I confess I understand better English- 
women who wish to fight. ... To ask 
Frenchwomen in such an hour to come 
and talk of arbitration and mediation 
and discourse of an armistice is to ask 
them to deny their nation. . . . All 
that Frenchwomen could desire is to 
awake and acclaim in their children, 
their husbands and brothers, and in 
their very fathers, the conviction that 
defensive war is a thing so holy that all 
must be abandoned, forgotten, sacrificed, 
and death must be faced heroically to 
defend and save that which is most 
sacred . . . our country. ... It would 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 127 

be to deny my dead to look for any- 
thing beside that which is and ought 
to be ! — if the God of right and jus- 
tice, the enemy of the devil and of 
force and crazy pride, is the true God." 
Thus awakened and transfigured by 
Calamity do men and women rise in 
their full spiritual nature, efface them- 
selves, and utter sacred words. Ca- 
lamity, when the Lusitania went down, 
wrung from the lips of an awakened 
German, Kuno Francke, this noble burst 
of patriotism: 

Ends Europe sof Then, in Thy mercy, 

God, 
Out of the foundering planet's gruesome 

night 
Pluck Thou my people's soul. From rage 

and craze 



128 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

Of the staled Earth, lift Thou it aloft, 
Re-youthed, and through transfiguration 

cleansed; 
So beaming shall it light the newer time, 
And heavenly, on a world refreshed, un- 
fold. 
Soul of my race, thou sinkest not to dust. 

If Germany's tragedy be, as I think, 
the deepest of all, the hope is that she, 
too, will be touched by the Pentecost 
of Calamity, and pluck her soul from 
Prussia, to whom she gave it in 1870. 
Thus shall the curse be lifted. 



XIV 



A 



XIV 

ND what of ourselves in this 
well-nigh world-wide cloud- 
burst? 

Every man has walked at night 
through gloom where objects were dim 
and hard to see, when suddenly a flash 
of lightning has struck the landscape 
livid. Trees close by, fences far off, 
houses, fields, animals and the faces of 
people — all things stand transfixed by 
a piercing distinctness. So now, in this 
thunderstorm of war, each nation and 
every man and woman is searchingly 
revealed by the perpetual lightnings. 
Whatever this American nation is, what- 
ever aspect, noble or ignoble, our De- 
131 



132 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

mocracy shows in the glare of this 
cataclysm, is even already engraved on 
the page of History, will be the portrait 
of the United States in 1914-15 for all 
time. 

I want no better photograph of any 
individual than his opinion of this war. 
If he has none, that is a photograph of 
him. Last autumn there were Americans 
who wished the papers would stop print- 
ing war news and give their readers a 
change. So we have their photographs, 
as well as those of other Americans who 
merely calculated the extra dollars they 
could squeeze out of Europe's need and 
agony. But that — thank God ! — is 
not what we look like as a whole. 
Our sympathy has poured out for Bel- 
gium a springtide of help and relief; it 
has flowed to the wounded and afflicted 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 133 

of Poland, Servia, France and England. 
A continuous publishing of books, maga- 
zine articles and editorials, full of jus- 
tice and of anger at Prussia's long- 
prepared and malignant assault, should 
prove to Europe that American hearts 
and heads by the thousand and hundred 
thousand are in the right place. Merely 
the stand taken by the New York Sun, 
New York Times, Outlook and Philadel- 
phia Public Ledger — to name no more 
— saves us from the reproach of moral 
neutrality: saves us as individuals. 

Yet, somehow, in Europe's eyes we 
fall short. The Allies, in spite of their 
recognition of our material generosity, 
find us spiritually wanting. In the 
London Punch, on the sinking of the 
Lusitania, Britannia stands perplexed 
and indignant behind the bowed figure 



134 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

of America, and, with a hand on her 
shoulder, addresses her thus : 

In silence you have looked on felon blows. 
On butcher's work of which the waste 
lands reek; 
Now, in God's name, from Whom your 
greatness flows, 
Sister, will you not speak ? 

This is asked of us not as individuals 
but as a nation; and as a nation our 
only spokesman is our Government : 
"Sister, will you not speak?" Well — 
we did speak; but after nine months 
of silence. This silence, in the opinion 
of French and Belgian emissaries who 
have talked to me with courteous frank- 
ness, constitutes our moral failure. 

"When this war began" — they say 
— " we all looked to you. You were the 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 135 

great Democracy; you were not in- 
volved; you would speak the justifying 
word we longed for. We knew you 
must keep out politically; this was 
your true part and your great strength. 
We altogether agreed with your Presi- 
dent there. But why did your univer- 
sities remain dumb? The University of 
Chicago stopped the mouth of a Belgian 
professor who was going to present Bel- 
gium's case in public. Your press has 
been divided. The word we expected 
from you has never come. You sent us 
your charity; but what we wanted was 
justice, ratification of our cause." 

To this I have answered : 

"First — Our universities do not and 
cannot sit like yours in high seats, in- 
spiring public opinion. I wish they did. 
Second — We are not yet melted into 



136 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

one nationality; we are a mosaic of 
languages and bloods; yet, even so, 
never in my life have I seen the Ameri- 
can press and people so united on any 
question. Third — Our charity is our 
very way — the only way we have — of 
telling you we are with you. I am glad 
you recognize the necessity of our po- 
litical neutrality. Anything else would 
have been, both historically and as an 
act of folly, unprecedented. Fourth — 
Do not forget that George Washington 
advised us to mind our own business." 

But they reply : " Isn't this your own 
business?" And there they touch the 
core of the matter. 

Across the sea the deadliest assault 
ever made on Democracy has been 
going on, month after month. We 
send bread and bandages to the 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 137 

wounded ; individually we denounce the 
assault. Columbia and Uncle Sam stand 
looking on. Is this quite enough ? War 
being out of the question, was there 
nothing else? No protest to register? 
Did the wide ocean wholly let Columbia 
out? Europe, weltering in her own 
failure, had turned towards us a wistful 
look. 

I cannot tell what George Washington 
would have thought; I only know that 
my answer to my European friends 
leaves them unconvinced — and there- 
fore how can it quite satisfy me ? Minds 
are exalted now, and white-hot. When 
they cool, what will our historic likeness 
be as revealed in the lightnings of this 
cosmic emergency? Will it be the por- 
trait of a people who sold its birthright 
for a mess of pottage? Viewing how 



138 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

we have given, and the tone of our press, 
perhaps this would hardly be just. Yet 
I can not but regret that we did not pro- 
test. What we lost in not doing so I 
see clearly; I can not see clearly what 
we gained. We may argue thus in our 
defense : If it is deemed that we missed 
a great opportunity in not protesting as 
signatories of the violated Hague con- 
ventions, are not our proofs of the vio- 
lations more authentic now than at the 
time? W T hat we heard was incredible 
to American minds. We had never 
made or known such war. By the time 
the truth was established a protest might 
have seemed somewhat belated. Well, 
this is all the explanation we can offer. 
Is it enough ? 

It is too early to answer ; certain it is 
that not as we see ourselves but as 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 139 

others see us, so shall we forever be. 
Certain it is also, and eternally, that 
through suffering alone men and nations 
find their greater selves. It is fifty years 
since we Americans knew the Pentecost 
of Calamity. These years have been too 
easy. We have not had to live danger- 
ously enough. We have prospered, we 
have been immune, and our prosperity 
has proved somewhat a curse in disguise. 
In these times that uncover men's 
souls and the souls of nations, has our 
soul come to light, or only our huge, 
lavish body? In 1865 we had found 
our soul indeed. Where is it gone ? We 
have been witnessing many "scholarly 
retreats," and every day we have had 
to hear the "maxims of a low prudence." 
Have they sunk to the core and killed 
it ? God forbid ! But since August, 1914, 



140 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

we have stood listening to the cry of our 
European brothers-in-Liberty. They did 
not ask our feeble arm to strike in their 
cause, but they yearned for our voice 
and did not get it. Will History acquit 
us of this silence ? 

Meanwhile, the maxims of a low pru- 
dence, masquerading as Christianity, 
daily counsel us to keep our arm feeble. 
It was not so that Washington survived 
Valley Forge, or Lincoln won through 
to Appomattox. If the Fourth of July 
and the Declaration it celebrates still 
mean anything to us, let our arm be 
strong. 

This for our own sake. For the sake 
of mankind, if this war brings home to 
us that we now sit in the council of na- 
tions and share directly in the general 
responsibility for the world's well-being, 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 141 

we shall have taken a great stride in 
national and spiritual maturity, and our 
talk about the brotherhood of man may 
progress from rhetoric towards realiza- 
tion. 



XV 



w 



XV 

E have yet to find our 
greater selves. We have 
also yet to realize that 
Europe, since the Spanish War, has 
counted us in the concert of great na- 
tions far more than we have counted 
ourselves. 

Somebody wrote in the New York 
Sun: 

We are not English, German, Sivede, 
Or Austrian, Russian, French or Pole; 

But we have made a separate breed 
And gained a separate soul. 

It sounds well; it means nothing; its 
sum total is zero. America asserts the 
k 145 



146 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

brotherhood of man and then talks about 
a separate soul ! 

To speak of the Old World and the 
New World is to speak in a dead lan- 
guage. The world is one. All hu- 
manity is in the same boat. The 
passengers multiply, but the boat re- 
mains the same size. And people who 
rock the boat must be stopped by force. 
America can no more separate itself 
from the destiny of Europe than it can 
escape the natural laws of the universe. 

Because we declared political inde- 
pendence, does any one still harbor the 
delusion that we are independent of the 
acts and fortunes of monarchs? If so, 
let him consider only these four events : 
In 1492 a Spanish Queen financed a 
sailor named Columbus — and Europe 
reached out and laid a hand on this 



THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 147 

hemisphere. In 1685 a French King 
revoked an edict — and thousands of 
Huguenots enriched our stock. In 1803 
a French consul, to spite Britain, sold us 
some land — it was pretty much every- 
thing west of the Mississippi. One 
might well have supposed we were inde- 
pendent of the heir of Austria. In 
1914 they killed him, and Europe fell 
to pieces — and that fall is shaking 
our ship of state from stem to stern. 
There may be some citizens down in 
the hold who do not know it — among a 
hundred million people you cannot ex- 
pect to have no imbeciles. 

Thus, from Palos, in 1492, to Sarajevo, 
in 1914, the hand of Europe has drawn 
us ever and ever closer. 

Yes, indeed; we are all in the same 
boat. Europe has never forgotten some 



148 THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY 

words spoken here once : " That govern- 
ment of the people, by the people, for 
the people, shall not perish from the 
earth." She waited to hear us repeat 
that in some form when The Hague 
conventions we signed were torn to scraps 
of paper. Perhaps nothing save calam- 
ity will teach us what Europe is thank- 
ful to have learned again — that some 
things are worse than war, and that you 
can pay too high a price for peace; but 
that you cannot pay too high for the 
finding and keeping of your own soul. 



[Finis] 



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